We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons
I’m always thinking about that Raúl Zurita quote that people put on Tumblr: Toda declaración de amor es urgente porque vamos a morir [every declaration of love is urgent because we’re going to die]. In real life, obviously, you cannot declare love to just anyone. You have to go with the flow, wait on other people’s time, accept their ambivalence, t... See more
Yet those of us who have never really nailed it down, who have charged through life from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, from new project to new project, even from personality-revolution to personality-revolution, have a secret also. I'm sorry to say it isn't the kind that desperate people can use to improve themselves, like those ads in the newspaper.
Mark Cohen • Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art)
We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are—so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to consci
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Everybody learns the irrelevance of these matters next to “real suffering.”